State At A Glance

June 02, 2007

COVENTRY -- Through the Adopt an Acre Project, students at Captain Nathan Hale Middle School raised $4,000 to acquire 30 acres of rain forest in the Rift Valley in Kenya to save it from destruction. ``I'm in awe of how hard the kids worked,'' said Nikki Hilton, a spokesperson for the Earth Foundation. ``They've done so much to make a difference in the world. It's really fantastic.''

MIDDLETOWN -- The police department's newly refurbished marine/dive truck has been a labor of love ever since Officer Bill Porter saw the 1988 Ford sitting idle at the highway garage in Durham. Purchased for $3,000 and overhauled by a local auto-body crew, the truck is now outfitted like a big-city emergency-services unit and is probably worth more than $90,000, Porter said.

NEWINGTON -- The plastic-draped dress shirts and pants are almost gone from the racks of Arrow Cleaners. But near the shop window are wedding gowns that were dry-cleaned in the 1990s. The brides never picked them up. ``I think what happened was, they got married and quickly got divorced,'' speculated owner Edward Magarian, 83. Edward and Sylvia Magarian are shutting down their dry-cleaning business at 4 p.m. today, for good. Arrow Cleaners opened in 1949.

PLAINVILLE -- William Bergenty has missed the deadline for telling the town how he will clean up the Shultz Salvage junkyard, which leaves officials looking at how they can escalate their enforcement efforts against him. The town ordered Bergenty in February to clean up the junkyard, which officials say is polluted with hazardous waste and violates local health regulations. WEST HARTFORD -- The town teachers' union will not renegotiate its contract despite a request from school officials to help cut $1.8 million from the budget by cutting two days of school and salary for those days. The union said it wants to meet with school officials to discuss other ways to cut the budget while minimizing the impact on students.